GETTING A FLAVOUR OF POSSIBILITIES
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are travelling from, and what sex and age they are, then an analysis of existing statistics would be a very useful place to start. You would then be in a position to use percentages and bar charts to demonstrate your findings. Alternatively, if you are more interested in the experiences of asylum seekers once they have arrived in the UK, then you might consider interviews or even try to spend some time living among them as a form of participant observation. Your project or dissertation would then present the words of your research participants or extracts from your research diary detailing, for example, something of daily life for a particular group of asylum seekers.
The section on Focusing in Chapter 2, particularly Box 2.8, considers the issues involved in drafting a research proposal.
In addition, your methodological decisions will depend upon how much time you have available, the expected word length of your project or dissertation, your research skills, the regulations and preferences of your department, school, examination board, manager and/or supervisor, what and whom you are able to access, the ethical parameters of your proposal and your own preferences. These represent some very practical concerns, and you would be well advised to consult with your supervisor or manager at the very outset. For example, if you are thinking of conducting an interview-based study and you are completing a 10,000 word MA dissertation conducted over a 3 month period, you might plan to interview between six to eight people once only. By comparison, for a PhD of 80,000 words conducted over a 3 year period and using a qualitative research approach, you might be expected to have an indepth knowledge of the lives of your research respondents, and be planning to spend an equivalent of 12 months conducting fieldwork. If you are planning to take a more quantitative approach and you are an undergraduate student undertaking a dissertation, you are unlikely to have the resources, in terms of time and money, available to conduct a large-scale survey. Secondary data analysis may, therefore, be a more fruitful strategy. Conversely, if you are conducting a quantitatively based PhD, then you should expect to have already, and to acquire further, a high level of statistical ability. The ways in which your research questions and interests shape the possible design of your research combine with practical issues such as time, resources and abilities. Accordingly, they each contribute to the ways in which your project will proceed. With this in mind, take a look at the representations of research shown in Box 1.3. These diagrams give alternative views of the research process. The most standard understanding of research is that showing a linear design, where the research begins with a problem and proceeds through data collection and analysis to the written report. The other diagram shows a far more iterative approach. This design seeks to convey the interrelationship between data collection, analysis and report writing. These two